


Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: Dance in the Graveyard - Delta Rae (Song)
Genre: Academia, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Magical Realism-ish, Parent Death, folk magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 06:19:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14514357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: A Dance in the Graveyard: Regional Variations on the Grim Procession Tradition in Northern Georgia and Western Louisiana, A Master's Thesis by Lavender "Trying Futiley To Resolve My Issues Through The Medium of Academia" Ortega





	Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

**Author's Note:**

  * For [basketofnovas (slashmarks)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/gifts).



_Abstract:_

_While the Grim Processions of American folk magic remain a little-explored side of spiritual communion. This paper seeks to expand upon both Oloye and Carney, examining regional variations on the Grim Procession tradition through personal interviews and whyyyyyyyyy do I have to do this god I hate writing abstracts_

_Personal mass spirit evocations (henceforth referred to as PMSEs or the more colloquial “Grim Processions”) occupy a space somewhere between community performance and lay spiritual leadership. The most in-depth examinations to date may be found in Daniel Oloye’s_ Funerals with Music: Death Pageantry in the Southeastern United States _(Harper-Collins, 2007, two dedicated chapters discussing the history, the ties to jazz funerals and European equinox celebrations, and the local attitudes toward Grim Procession celebrants) and James Carney’s much more clinical study_ EKG Analyses of Personal Mass Spirit Evocations _(Harvard University Press, 1999, the final nails in the coffin regarding PMSEs’ status as illusory personal projections rather than true spirit evocation.) Both scholars provide basic overviews with case studies, but little emphasis on regional traditions and a true dialogue with Grim Procession practitioners, commonly referred to as "celebrants." The musically- or psychically-gifted individuals drawn to celebrant status_

* * *

 The screen of my crappy desktop PC finally goes dark, hiding the words I've been doing my best to whip into some kind of shape all evening before plunking myself down at the vanity table across the room to do my makeup for the night's festivities. The laminated obituary I still have taped to the top of the mirror frame flutters in the breeze from the open window, my mom's face gazing smilingly down at my pitiful attempts to rework the opening paragraphs I've been wrestling with for months now, even before I decided to try and get a ground-level view of what I was writing about. I sigh and go back to painting the space just under my less-than-prominent cheekbones into skeletal hollows.

My mom died at the beginning of my sophomore year of the college she’d been so proud of me for attending. Reflecting on the good times before that seems trite and hurts too much anyway, so lately I’ve been reflecting on the months after. It turned out she was the only thing that really held the family together as a unit, so when she was gone we sort of fell apart into separate units who happened to live together. The therapist I blew most of my scholarship on seeing for a while asked me about it once and the best comparison I could come up with was the fingers of a door hinge without a central pin. My dad, my brother, Larry, and I all sort of drifted apart into separate spheres where we could practice our own ways of not dealing with it. Dad just kept working like an automaton. Larry got a job and a car but stayed living at home, throwing all his energy into cooking feta-stuffed chicken breasts or angel hair pasta with vegetable stir-fry and then getting mad at us when we didn't eat them. I sort of drifted mindlessly from undeclared major to thaum studies to anthropology in hopes that life would make a little more sense when viewed from an ivory tower observation deck. It's been a little easier that way, like it's easier to pigeonhole everything about this experience into academic references rather than thinking about them in relation to myself and my actual experiences.

Much like Zora Neale Hurston, who’s been my literary hero ever since I did a book report on _Mules and Men_ for Black History Month in seventh grade and actually liked the stories, I ended up coming back home for anthropology stuff with that in mind. It wasn't exactly hard to get a spot in the Grim Procession of Spanish Corners - lay folk magic in tiny rural towns no one cares about rarely is. I'd gone to high school a couple years behind Starla Greyson, who had been the Third Drum back when she was still a teenager and had recently moved to First (following in her witch grandmother's footsteps, or so I'm informed by townfolk disapproving of nice local girls practicing death magic and occasionally playing drums for a semi-famous local band.) A chance run-in at Grady's All-Night Diner followed by a phone call had gotten me subbed in for her kid cousin who had just moved away and who she hadn't found a replacement for in time for Lammas. Pete, the Caller, Duke, the Box, and Jamie, the Second Drum, were fairly permanent fixtures and had all accepted me with varying degrees of wariness, but hadn't left me on my own to be a petitioner and probably call the whole thing off in fear of  _actually_ confronting anything personal.

And now I'm sitting in front of my mirror, making myself up for a Grim Procession like the ones Larry and I sometimes watched out his bedroom window when I was a kid. Neither of my parents had ever been petitioners, and until recently I hadn’t lost anyone important enough to merit being one myself. Instead, here I am, slathering on black-and-white makeup that’s something of a convergent evolution with Mexican calavera figurines, the aesthetics more heavily overlapping in western Texas (Lalouche, 1990) and wondering whether I should have put the lacy black dress I bought on first. In retrospect, maybe I should have asked the other girls to come over and help me since I barely wear makeup as it is, but as long as it looks okay in the dark I doubt anyone will be offended.

In the mirror if I hold my head just right it looks like my eyes are just hollows. I grab the maracas Pete gave me in lieu of any instrument that actually requires knowledge of how to play it, and shut the door behind me like a full stop. Dad and Larry both seem to be asleep, for which I’m grateful.

The path down to the river isn't well-lit by the dark windows of the houses behind it, but I have a flashlight and sensible-yet-stylish hiking boots and at least it's not far. Pete’s waiting at the starting place near the cattle gate by the old cemetery footpath, twirling his calling staff (conjure staff, thaumaturgical focus) around like a drum major with a baton. Duke leans against a dark lamp post tuning his guitar. “Welcome to the Black Parade,” he tells me as I begin shaking my maracas in time to his riffs.

“So you guys have done this without a Third Drum before, right?” My voice sounds small in the darkness, the sound disappearing into the mist that’s been crawling out of the river into the summer heat.

Duke nods. "I dunno about too long before, but Starla's grandma used to talk about how back in her day people thought it was weird hillbilly junk and no one did it except the hillbillies. We've had three sometimes, but mostly it's just been her and Jamie."

"Cool. If I hadn't been here would you have just gone with two Drums, or found someone else who could play the maracas reasonably well?"

“Second thoughts already? I thought you were doing this for a grade,” Pete snarks.

“Man, don’t be an ass. What’s wrong, Ven?” Duke asks me.

“It was a hypothetical question. Forget it.” I ignore both arch and curious-pitying looks and lean against the lamppost on the other side of Duke, trying to coast between My Own Issues and Abetting The Exoticization Of Marginalized Cultures like Odysseus navigating Scylla and Charybdis.

“Who’s asking questions? I didn’t think that was allowed,” Starla’s voice sounds from behind us, accompanied by the muffled rattle of Jamie’s tambourine. “Happy Lammas, y'all. Sorry we’re late, I was nearly out of gas.”

“Five minutes either side can’t hurt. As long as you don’t take half an hour and the stupid thing doesn’t light, like Duke that one time,” Pete says, swatting aside the clump of Spanish moss Duke throws his way. “That ever happen to your grandma?”

“Nah. She always said that revenant they raised was because they started late, but everyone knew there was a guy doing petro shit all over the place and he didn’t lay one of his zombies right.” Starla shrugs the strap of her drums over her shoulders and steps behind Pete. “Everyone ready to go?” she asks as I take my place to her right, with Jamie and her pretty blonde braids and red calavera dress on the left.

In answer, Pete thumps his calling staff on the ground and a neon-blue flame bursts out of the top as Duke steps up behind him.

Drumbeats.

Fingers of mist parting.

The dry hiss of my maracas.

And we’re moving. Starla’s actual drumming is keeping me in a semblance of time, like training wheels on a bike, as we walk. I’ve never heard of a Grim Procession failing to call anything when the celebrants played too badly, although _Funerals with Music_ talks about people being too busy throwing rotten produce at the celebrants to pay any attention to the spirits. I’m already sweating, beads of skull-white and empty-grave black forming on my face, but I don’t dare dab them away, even as I blink one into my eye at the first flare from the caller’s staff.

The first petitioner shows up about five minutes in. In the dark it looks like a tall guy with cornrows, but I saw a lady who looked similar at Grady's yesterday when we met up there before music practice. (Clearly an out-of-towner; no one around here would be caught dead with that much hair in the middle of summer. Except maybe a celebrant.) They fall in line behind us as we walk, and I can’t remember whether it’s supposed to be an orderly line like a jazz funeral or more of a cluster traditionally. I’ve seen both around here, and with the amount of attention that the Grim Procession anywhere gets in studies it’s pretty hard to know who does what. Two more eventually join us, an old white lady I don’t know and an old black lady I think I recognize from when Mom used to drag all of us to church most weekends.

Another flare goes up from the staff and the cemetery road is briefly twilight blue. I shake my maracas with new purpose: _Boys_ and _girls_ come _out_ to _play._ The _moon_ is _shin_ ing _bright_ as _day._ Starla either picks up my rhythm or has already been doing it for me to latch onto, and as the headstone shaped like a mastaba by the old cemetery gate comes into view the nursery rhyme is echoing through my head like a too-catchy song. I can’t even see the moon through the fog off the river, but the song still seems apt as people keep joining us—a little girl in a nightgown who looks like she’s climbed out a window, a couple of gothed-up out-of-towners who might be twins, even a white-muzzled black lab who might be a celebrant or just out here on its own. While they don’t have a monopoly on thaumaturgical sensitivity, it’s not an urban legend that pure-black and pure-white animals are especially susceptible to stuff like this (Ramujan, 1979.)

Pete puts a foot through the dog and I nearly drop my maracas. Neither of them seems to notice, and I’m hard-pressed to see it in my peripheral vision as I glance at everyone else to see if they see anything. The little girl, on the other hand, lights up like early morning, getting down on the ground to begin wrestling with something I can only bring back into focus if I really focus on the very personal mélange of memories we’re bringing to the fore in her. (The technical term, after all, is “ _personal_ mass spirit evocations” for a reason.) Next to her the twins are exclaiming over another shadow, the black church lady cradled in the arms of a shadow like twice her height who was probably her husband who I remember dying right before I left for college. Larry, who was still occasionally playing piano for church, baked her a cake. I remember him delivering it as I glared at him out the window from the side of Mom’s bed.

With that thought, the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

I’m too scared to look up and see who’s celebrating the celebrants, so I stare at my maracas and focus on the thrum of the Box and the two other beats. Between the music, the clinging fog, and the occasional neon-blue flashes still going up from the calling-staff it sort of feels like I’m at the world’s most laid-back rave. I tried to like the club scene when I finally got old enough to go to clubs, but my lack of interest in either drinking or dancing wasn’t enough to make the people-watching or socializing worth it.

Mom, however, had died thinking I enjoyed it. The last more-or-less coherent thing I remember her saying to me was recounting a dream she’d had two nights before she died. _You were at the campus club_ , she told me from the living room chair she’d been in for her last forty-eight hours of life, _and some people were giving you trouble, but you just told them to back off and they did._

"I'm sorry," I whisper, finally raising my stinging eyes. "I'm not as brave as you thought I was."

Larry and my dad are the first people I see, and I feel surprised for a split second, then incredibly dumb for feeling surprised. (Grief makes narcissists of us all, I guess.) Mom is standing under a gauze of Spanish moss, dressed just like she’d come from running some errands and smiling right at me. They're both staring at her, then glance toward  _where_ she's staring. Both their mouths fall open.  _Ven?_ I see, rather than hear, my dad say.

I wave feebly with one of my maracas, still in time with the rhythm that feels like it's molded itself to my heartbeat as Mom steps forward.  _It's not her,_ I keep telling myself, even as she takes Dad's and Larry's hands, even as she smiles like every picture of her still magneted to the fridge.  _It's a slightly more animated video clip. It's a 3-D obituary. It's not her._

But it is her. A memory imprintation, manifested by the celebrant locus, (Michon, 1995) is the composite of everything a personal spirit evocation ever meant to the one they're manifesting for. She's here, made real by the celebrants, by Dad, and Larry, and maybe even some of the people around us - the old lady, who brought  _us_ a cake in return, Duke, who's some kind of cousin of hers by marriage, even the swampy graveyard around us for which she'd helped circulated a petition to keep it from being bulldozed into condominiums. By now it felt like I'd heard every existing platitude about legacies, dead people living on in what they'd left behind, but apparently I'd never actually understood any of them until now. _Do not stand by my grave and weep;/I am not there, I do not sleep._ Or, to get a little more pop-cultural, "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

She would be proud of me for quoting books at a time like this. Maybe even for the constant citations.

Surrounded by her fellow shadows, I accepted every stupid platitude I’d ever heard as Larry and Dad step up to dance with her, letting everything she'd ever been to us coalesce in the muggy night.


End file.
